


Soundless

by shittershutter



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 22:28:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11860923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shittershutter/pseuds/shittershutter
Summary: "Gibson," Tommy says, tone flat.The man on the bed raises his eyes, green as the waves washing off that god-forsaken beach. He doesn't say anything, but Tommy doesn't expect him to.





	Soundless

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授翻】Soundless](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12152046) by [psychomath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychomath/pseuds/psychomath)



> * * * It's the longest fic I've ever written, so it's going to be filled with mistakes of the most embarrassing nature. Brace yourselves. 
> 
> * * * Contains mentions of PTSD. But has a happy end, all things considered. 
> 
> * * * Gibson is alive because he deserves to be. 
> 
> * * * I'm not even into this pairing, I have no idea what happened.

Mere months before his only ambition in life was to die in one piece to save his mama from all the horror. They bury hands, he's heard. Torsos, boots, and feet in them -- everything they can identify. 

Now everyone is suddenly taken with his plans for the future. The country needs to be rebuilt, and it's up to the young, bright-eyed people to take to the task shoulder to shoulder. 

Tommy is all for the tireless work. It's the bright-eyed enthusiasm he can't muster, the ordinary life he can't manage. 

It's an early winter, streets covered in treacherous thin ice that will be the death of him and his leg one day when he drags himself up the hospital stairs, one tiny step after another. 

"You," the doctor corrects him for the millionth time. "Just you. The leg is you as well". 

Tommy feels squeezed tightly between the cane on the left and the burning hip on the right, but he nods a few times. 

You see, doc -- he wants to say -- when you lie in the trenches with your entire leg in pieces it's paramount to your survival to separate yourself from the pain, so your head remains cold, and your hands remain capable despite the agony. If you are interested in surviving, that is. 

The thing is, after the war the pain subsides only marginally and what Tommy has now is essentially a highly customized crutch growing straight out of him that he drags across London and occasionally when the weather is fine and the angle is good he can rest his weight on. 

So they still are "his leg and him," strictly out of self-preservation.

He doesn't say anything out loud to avoid another psychiatric evaluation. 

"It'll be all good, doc," he says with a snicker -- a joke he and Alex go through the entire war with throwing it back and forth at each other every time the circumstances are everything but good. 

The doctor frowns but pushes his bottled medication across the table. 

He then closes Tommy's folder, glances at his notes and back at it. 

So there *will* be another psychiatric evaluation, after all. Tommy sinks deeper into the chair and covers his eyes with the damaged hand.

"We have a patient here with your dog tags among his possessions," the doctor says instead. "Maybe you can help us to identify him. Follow me."

*** 

_"Look at it," Tommy waves a bandaged arm, blood blossoming through the grayish white, in front of Alex's face._

__

__

_The bullet takes off his little finger with a half of the ring finger to boot. It's a small blood, a drop into the sea of stretchers with limbless moaning soldiers around them._

_"Fucking amateur," Alex scoffs flicking a cigarette at him. "You can't even get yourself blown into smithereens properly, like a real man would."_

_It doesn't hurt at all. Tommy remembers being a little mama's boy in his other life before the beach, before the trenches. Crying over a busted knee or a bug he accidentally stepped on. It's such a distant echo of who he is now._

_"It'll be all good, doc," he tells Alex and bursts into laughter despite himself._

_Alex blinks and joins him. They howl like hyenas through the bombs exploding in the distance and desperate human moans much closer until someone threatens to take them outside and shoot them if they don't tone it down._

***

"Gibson," Tommy says, tone flat. 

The man on the bed raises his eyes, green as the waves washing off that god-forsaken beach. He doesn't say anything, but Tommy doesn't expect him to. 

His dog tags, he figured, were at the bottom of the damn Channel along with his rifle. Except they are currently around Gibson's neck.

He shudders as he remembers the fight with water slowing his every move. He remembers hands on him, remembers letting Gibson go for a brief moment and then feeling through the liquid darkness until he sees the sky.

Nurses package Gibson for him, quick and efficient, complete with a coat and a thin folder of information they managed to gather while observing the patient. 

They glance at Tommy over and over like they expect him to bolt. Like he can bolt while fixed to the floor by his leg and the eyes that haunt his nightmares for five years straight. 

He listens to the doctor halfheartedly, the running scroll of Gibson's injuries and misfortunes at his ear. He's been liberated from the camp and treated to the best of their ability, he says. 

His voice sounds distant because Tommy is not in the room. He is in a cold water swimming for Moonstone and turning frantically around, trying to locate Gibson among the oil-smeared faces. 

He hadn't made a sound -- no moan, no nothing -- since he arrived, the doctor goes on. Him reacting to Tommy in the doorway is the most social they've seen him in a year. 

Tommy shakes his head to get the sound of sloshing water out of his ears. 

What Gibson is going through is not physical, the voice in his ear concludes. And the hospital could use an extra cot for someone who needs it. So Tommy better step up if he doesn't want to see his friend sent to an institution for people who can't get themselves together. 

"I'm not leaving him behind." Not now. 

Tommy's mock calmness drains through his pores when Gibson steps closer to him. 

"I'm sorry," he blurts out. "I'm sorry, I tried to keep an eye on you. I... I was looking for you but I couldn't..."

He can see Gibson's eyes flickering in recognition. It's so unlike that cautiously confused gaze he remembers. 

"You understand what I'm saying," he thinks. "Now you do."

Gibson steps into his personal space and pulls him into a tight hug. 

*** 

_Alex does get the girls for them when they are halfway through their victory celebration binge that lasts either weeks or months depending on who you ask. Girls like war heroes even if their only achievement was not kicking the bucket -- and Tommy can't deny, they both are at an expert level of not dying at this point._

_They get properly drunk, and as the needle hisses against the vinyl, music crooning, Tommy's date leans in and puts her soft, impossibly light hands on Tommy's face._

_"Careful, my darling," Alex warns her from the other side of the room. "My friend here is a bit skittish."_

_Her fingers stroke him behind the ears as she looks up at him, rocking -- Tommy can't take her for a proper spin, but he can sway them from side to side with the amplitude his damaged leg allows._

_She is beautiful as a picture, a doll-like painted face is so close it blurs around the edges, and she kisses him humming with the music._

_To his credit, Tommy surprises himself, too, when he starts bawling. The shiver wrecks him, his mouth dry, and no matter how hard he's gasping he can't get enough breath in to clear his head._

_He cries a lot when he is alone in bed, when it's too dark around him, and the streets outside him are too quiet. It's soundless -- the war teaches you to be quiet._

_The sounds he makes are far from his soft midnight sobs. It's like the girl, and her pretty dress, and her hands, and the music turn him into a wounded animal who nearly roars with grief he cannot express in any other way._

_He half expects Alex to be pissed, rightfully so, for fucking his entire evening over. Instead, as the other man leans in, fighting the hands off Tommy's face to take a better look, he looks solemn, concerned in a way Alex seldom does._

_Tommy pours snot all over Alex's hands and howls like a rabid dog until his lungs burn._

_"Excuse my friend, ladies," Alex says. "He's a bit under the weather."_

_He wraps him in a coat and a scarf wiping his nose with his sleeve like he is a little child who has lost his mittens and walks him home, leaving the girls behind._

_"I'm so sorry," Tommy is still gasping as Alex is taking his boots off and tucking him in for the night. "I just, I don't know how to do... this..." Normal life, his mind supplies. Being something else than a rifle; buying milk; changing sheets; holding people who put on their best dresses for you..._

_"I know," Alex says lightly. "It'll be all good, doc." He kicks his boots off and stays with him until the morning._

***

Gibson shows him what happened. They sit on the floor of Tommy's hellhole of an apartment, passing a bottle to each other, and when Tommy is tipsy enough, he just asks. 

Gibson moves his hands in a flowy motion. Waves, Tommy guesses, his hands suddenly cold. Then the other man's hands go to his throat as he grabs himself, gasping, shaking, struggling against the unseen restraints. 

He drops his hands, head falling to his shoulder, eyes closed, and rocks softly from side to side. 

Then he opens his eyes, makes a gun out of his fingers and puts it to his temple. 

"No!" Tommy gasps and before he can remind himself where and when he is he surges forward and tears the gun-like hand away from Gibson's temple. 

The pulse is rabbit-fast under his fingertips, but Gibson stares into his eyes and doesn't take his hand away. 

* * * 

When Alex finally gathers all of his courage to come over, there is a certain expectation of punches flying in the air. 

The storm is raging outside, and the water drops pour down Alex's cheeks making him look more remorseful than he probably feels. 

But he comes closer to the table after wrestling off his soaking wet coat and by the dropped line of his shoulders Tommy can tell he's expecting and willing to give Gibson the right to a proper punch. 

Gibson leans in, takes his wet hand and shakes it instead. 

* * * 

The notepad and the pencil are lying around ignored for weeks. Until it strikes Tommy, obvious as it is, that if Gibson can understand English, it doesn't mean he can write in it. 

Tommy steals the stationary from the typography he works in, packaging the newspapers in neat little piles day in and day out. 

Monotonous tasks calm him down as he notices, help to manage the shivers his remaining fingers occasionally break into on their own accord. 

He puts the notepad on the table and waits for Gibson to come home from the docks. He's physically well enough for hard labor, doesn't ask questions and has a friendly face -- people love him there. 

"What is your name?" Tommy asks pushing the notepad across the wooden surface. 

"Gibson," he spells out, and Tommy smacks his hand and rolls his eyes. 

"The other one, dummy. The one your mama gave you." 

Gibson sighs and scribbles some more, longer this time and turns the paper in. 

Tommy gasps. It probably sounds beautiful. Fucking French and their obsession with extra letters. 

"... how... do you even pronounce that?"

Gibson's breath hitches and his lips part but no sound comes out. Tommy releases his own nervous breath and pats the other man's shoulder. Maybe next time. 

* * *

Tommy listens. Like he would concentrate on every rustling leaf and every creaking branch under his feet, he listens to the breathing of the man he lives with. 

It comes in short puffs when Gibson is agitated and when he is calm Tommy can't hear it at all. There are undertones to it, its own melody.

Gibson's nightmares are completely soundless.

He often wakes up at night next to a rigid body that is covered in wet clothes, the sharp acidic smell of sweat filling his nostrils. 

He shakes the man awake until he jolts upright, gasping, eyes wild. And the first time Tommy doesn't know what to do. It's bloody difficult to save the man from something that was real and true but isn't now. 

So they stare at each other, eye whites glimmering in the dark, and then Tommy does what he wishes someone would have done to him all those times he wept alone into his pillow -- he gathers the man into his arms carefully and lies down with him.

At a certain point, it just settles in Tommy's thick skull that if -- when -- Gibson's voice comes back everything is going to be alright. 

The world will rebuild itself. They will rebuild themselves, too. 

It's a superstition, but Tommy has waited for years for something to believe in. So he listens, and he waits. 

He is still waiting when Gibson reaches across the kitchen table and touches a flock of gray hair right above Tommy's forehead. 

He has no idea when it appeared but at some point in winter -- he remembers the unforgiving snow filling his boots -- when he got a rare opportunity to face a big clear mirror he took off his helmet and it was there. He is in his early twenties and in addition to feeling like a hundred-year-old man he is slowly starting to look like one.

Not quite sure in cleverness of this impulse he reflects the gesture and slides his fingers into the other man's hair like he wanted to for a really long time. 

The black curls wrap around his fingers, and he feels Gibson leaning into the touch like a cat. He rubs at the scalp absently not wanting to let go, not yet. 

Then Gibson is moving forward and kissing him, dry lips moving along his lips until Tommy opens his mouth and lets his tongue in. 

Tommy half expects himself to cry but feels like smiling into the kiss instead. 

He limps to push his bent leg between Gibson's knees and keeps kissing back, and when he's out of breath, he kisses the man's jaw instead, his throat, down to the center of his chest. 

"It's locked down here somewhere," he thinks as he nuzzles at the skin. "The voice. "

Gibson is breathing heavily now, in a way Tommy doesn't recognize. He decides he likes this new way of air moving in and out the best as he takes Gibson by the hand and brings him to bed. 

* * * 

Gibson slides between his legs, pushing at the knees making Tommy shriek pathetically. 

"It's okay, it's okay," he chants afterward, soft hands around Gibson's mortified face. "It just doesn't bend this way anymore."

He tries to straighten the damn leg with Gibson's help, and it almost gives with the pillow under his knee. 

"I've never done it before," he adds like Gibson would care or notice when Tommy's body is so rigid with echoing pain. 

A girl fondled his prick in his trousers after the school dance once, and while it never led to a completion he was pretty optimistic about the prospects but then the war came, and Tommy in his own head could never be a lover and a fighter at the same time. 

According to Alex, the prick fondling doesn't count either way. 

Gibson's eyebrows go up to his hairline and for the first time Tommy is grateful the man above him doesn't speak. But then he bumps his nose against Tommy's and settles between his legs more comfortably. 

Tommy fumbles with Vaseline he's given to tend to the scarring tissue. It keeps falling out of his trembling hands until Gibson huffs with laughter, gives his hand a quick kiss and takes it from there. 

From that moment and until the head of Gibson's cock bumps against his hole he is reduced to soundless breaths, too. Until Gibson kisses the top of his head and pushes in and Tommy stops breathing altogether. 

It's not good, not yet. But it's getting there. 

Gibson digs the elbows in on each side of his head and turns into stone, rigid as the length burning against Tommy's insides. 

Despite the echoing currents of pain in his leg, hip to toe, despite the aching stretch between his legs, Tommy keeps searching for the sound between the labored huffs of breath the other man lets out. 

It's not there. He leans up and nuzzles the center of the other's man chest to coax it out, and while it's futile, it earns him a kiss for the trouble. 

Gibson slides a hand between them, tentative fingers against the stretched rim of muscle, against his own cock almost fully seated, and Tommy can't resist joining in, feeling through the thick hair down Gibson's groin and the slick edges of his hole. 

Their fingers bump against each other and through the tremor that wrecks him Tommy thinks, "I'm his. He's taken me."

After years of being nothing but a pair of boots, after having nothing but the clutch of ground to sleep on the thought makes him wheeze with an unspoken emotion, the unfamiliar feeling of being somebody, somewhere. 

He kisses the concerned frown off Gibson's forehead and wraps his arms around his shoulders bracing himself for the wave to come. 

It's shallow and hard enough to keep Gibson panting, soundless, into Tommy's ear. A dry breath of someone one pneumonia away from death that burns the side of his head.

He hooks a leg around Gibson's hips and starts moving with him when the slick drag against his walls becomes not enough. 

Gibson reaches under his waist and pushes their bodies flush together, so his cock is trapped between them and he digs his heel into Gibson's ass for leverage rotating his hips against his stomach. 

Gibson pushes Tommy's hips down to the bed leaning down instead, so he doesn't exert his hip again and fucks him fast until they both come. 

Tommy feels full then, hot and filled to the brim. Feels like crying again because of the duality of this feeling of being used and taken care of. He's about to, hot tears forming under the lashes when all he feels is love. It's the kind of love he felt for his old life, for his home back then running down the streets of Dunkirk. 

The kind of love that gets you through hell. 

He feels the sound then, physically forming around them like a distant siren through the waves and the wind. The old plumbing in the walls never fails to take him back to that beach, and he's about to go there again, now, being rocked by the gentle rise and fall of Gibson's rib cage until he realizes Gibson *is* the source of the sound. 

The quiet content hum -- and he can feel the vibration of it in Gibson's throat, can hear it with his breath hitched. 

He tries not to react, not to startle the man just letting the sound to run its course. 

Gibson lets out a dry exhale when Tommy presses his mouth to the dip between his collarbones. "This is where it stuck," Tommy thinks, nuzzling the spot as the burning sensation under his eyelids returns. 

He falls asleep atop of the other man, face tucked under his jaw. The last thing he feels before succumbing into a deep dreamless sleep is the soft fingers spreading his cheeks, wiping him up. 

The hum, quiet and brief as it was, rings in his ears, lulling him to sleep.


End file.
